


Of Melodies and Words

by melodysketches



Category: Super Junior
Genre: F/M, Fluff, inspired by music and lyrics, self-indulgence fics, there are some curse words, yeah the drew barrymore and hugh grant movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24407866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melodysketches/pseuds/melodysketches
Summary: Cho Kyuhyun is stuck with a songwriter equivalent of a writer's block, and went on a holiday to a rural suburb. He met a charming girl with a penchant for words instead.
Relationships: Cho Kyuhyun/Jeon Mido, Kyuhyun/Mido
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Of Melodies and Words

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily inspired by the film Music and Lyrics (even some dialogues are taken from the movie)!

“I think you really should go.”

Kyuhyun looked up from his laptop and rolled his eyes at his boss, a lanky guy named Hyukjae. Everyone around him seemed to be overreacting since he got drunk one week ago and told Donghae _I do not think I can write songs anymore_ while crying. He got 100 missed-calls from Hyukjae (courtesy of Donghae panic-calling the said boss) when he woke up the next day. And now everyone in the company believed that their most productive songwriter needed to take a break.

Take a break? He did not do breaks. He pulled all-nighters with his piano and guitar and came out with chart-topping hits and hiding the fact that he felt he had been squeezed dry. Hence the crying while drunk thing.

Hyukjae raised his eyebrows at him. “Hey, it’s a paid-leave anyway. Just do yourself a favor,” Kyuhyun looked at his currently very empty MIDI file, stuck on a project for the newest solo debut in the company. He sighed and closed the program.

“Just go, or I’ll fire you,” Hyukjae said, shrugging.

The thing about it was she never really fit in Seoul. She found the city exhausting, and the city found her weird. She liked her quiet hometown in a small suburb of Nam-won. Her house had a garden, full of potted-plants and bonsai, a luxury she never fully appreciated back then. Her apartment in Seoul barely had a balcony. Also, Nam-won had her grandparents, which Seoul would never have.

Mido ran her fingers through Danggeun’s fur who was sleeping on her lap. It vehemently refused to be kept in a cat box through the 3 hour drive it took from Seoul to Nam-won and preferred to curl up on the seat or her lap. She did not mind that one bit.

She spotted the familiar Sobaek Mountains, which meant she was not far away from her home anymore. She was on the phone with her best-friend turned agent Chaeyeon who kept asking _why did you not want to go the talk show again? It’s good publicity_! I never did this for the fame anyway, she told her. I just love writing.

“I’d be surprised if you do.” Chaeyeon sounded exasperated but giddy over the phone. There were not many trees here. The huge lands in Nam-won were mainly used for rice fields or just plainly abandoned. The lack of trees accentuated today’s sunny weather. It was always sunny in Nam-won. Far better than Seoul. “Still, your fans have been waiting for you to release something new for five years.” Chaeyeon continued.

Mido chuckled. “Well, I already did the livestream thing.” Mido told her that that they would not need more publicity after that. Everyone already knew about her new book coming out anyway.

“By the way, Hyukjae said someone is going to stay in his house,” Chaeyeon sighed. “At this point he would just keep sending people over but never going back himself.”

Mido thought that Hyukjae just enjoyed his life in the city too much, and no one could blame him really. For the majority of people, living in Seoul would beat living in the internet-less Nam-won by a mile. But since Hyukjae’s house was right next to hers, she hoped her new neighbor would not mind Danggeun running around.

Mido got woken up early in the morning by the smell of her grandmother’s signature soft tofu stew. It had been a week after she arrived at Nam-won. During the week, she had gone through the routine she used to do while actually living here. Minus going to the school. It was almost like she never left.

She went to the kitchen with Danggeun tailing her. The cat was lazy and overweight, but it liked following her around even when it could barely walk. Her grandmother asked whether cats could go on diet. “Probably yes, but Danggeun wouldn’t do it anyway,” Mido laughed. Picturing Danggeun eating half than her usual full bowl seemed unrealistic.

Her grandmother shoved a full bowl of the stew into her hands. “Our new neighbor is probably hungry.” Her grandmother said she saw many cups of ramen on their shared trashcan and got concerned. It was the normal way single men lived in Seoul, Mido told her. Don’t get too concerned.

Danggeun jumped out to the street the moment she opened the door. She walked out of the house only to see her cat perched on someone’s shoed-feet. She stopped and watched Danggeun tried to cuddle it while the owner of the said feet looked like he did not know what to do with it. “Danggeun, come here.” She called, and her cat walked slowly to her.

The boy looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Danggeun?”

“Its furs match, don’t you think?” It was orange like carrot, she pointed out. The boy still looked at her like she grew three heads. “Are you friends with Hyukjae?” He nodded, and then looked at the bowl of soup in her hands. “It’s for you from my grandmother.” She handed the bowl to him and his eyebrows raised even higher.

He thanked her and her grandmother. “Hyukjae told me to come here or else I am fired.” Danggeun slowly walked to him again, not giving up on its quest to cuddle up in his feet. He did not look scared, she thought. Just slightly uncomfortable. He also looked strangely familiar, but Mido could not put her fingers on when or how she had seen him.

Mido smiled. “Well, have a nice stay,” He smiled back. Danggeun meowed and scratched its two front legs, and that was their first meeting.

Kyuhyun pressed some basic melodies on his keyboard. It was the only instrument he brought here since Hyukjae would not let him work like he usually did. He had come up with a handful of melodies but none of them were something he would let someone hear. Not to mention he still had no idea about the lyrics, the theme, the overall ambiance of the song… everything really.

Donghae told him that it was something like a writer’s block. He was not a writer per se, but he did the majority of his song’s lyrics by himself. He usually produced them, too. He enjoyed trying to fix K-pop stars’ off-pitch voice and the royalties were not bad either. It was something he did for fun before everything happened, but somehow turned into a full-time job without realizing it himself.

Anyway, writer’s block. He sure had it, going by the description Donghae said to him. There was a wall in his mind, cutting off everything—melodies, lyrics, inspiration—that usually came so easy for him. Everything was there, but the fucking wall would not fucking budge.

“Damn it,” he pressed his face down on the keys of his keyboard, sending out an unpleasant series of sounds. It had been nine days since he told Hyukjae to shut up and then packed his bags to Nam-won. The place was okay though. He was a Seoul boy born-and-bred and once swore to never live anywhere else, but the quietness of the suburb warmed up to him. He liked it. The rice fields and the mountain air and quirky neighbors with too-fat cat.

The sun was setting outside his window. Kyuhyun closed his eyes and fell asleep on his keyboard without realizing it, thinking about the cat and the mountains and his neighbor’s pretty eyes.

Kyuhyun was lazing around on the living room’s sofa when he heard a cat’s meow. A fat orange cat poked its head into his house, looking curious. The cat waddled over to him and nuzzled his feet before flopping besides him and fell asleep. His neighbor’s cat really liked him, judging from the way it had tried to snuggle with him every time they met.

“Danggeun?” Someone called the cat’s name. Kyuhyun looked up and saw another head poking into his house, this time belonging to the girl whose cat currently in deep sleep at his feet. The girl tied up her short hair this time, different than the last time he saw her. Her bangs were long but not long enough to join the rest of the hair, so it hung and framed her face. Kyuhyun thought it was cute.

He told her the cat was asleep at his feet. The girl was hesitant at first, but she quickly approached him and smiled apologetically. “It’s supposed to be Danggeun’s meal time now. I’m surprised he chose to sleep here instead,” She crouched down and rubbed the cat’s back, earning nothing but a louder purr.

“I think your cat likes me,” Kyuhyun said quietly. She smiled and said she had known for a while now. He noticed how her eyes smiled, too. He got up from the sofa and offered her a cup of coffee. “Are you close with Hyukjae?”

She shrugged. “We went to school together, but since they moved to Seoul I never heard from him other than the usual status update on Facebook,” She accepted the instant coffee he made. He made another note to himself that she was very short. She barely came up to his shoulders. Or was he just tall?

She asked him if he was one of Hyukjae’s songwriters. “Yeah, basically.” Now he was the one shrugging. “My name’s Kyuhyun, by the way. We never properly introduce ourselves.”

“It’s Mido.” Kyuhyun noted that her name sounded like the music notes. Mi and Do. She looked at him, eyes curved into smiles and then laughter. She said that it was indeed quite an unusual name, but she enjoyed never having mistaken for someone else. He took a sip from his own coffee, looking at everything but her smiley face.

“What are you doing here? Escaping Seoul?”

He sighed and explained that Hyukjae had threatened to fire him if he did not take a break and go here. “My colleague said I have a songwriter’s equivalent of writer’s block and they think a paid vacation can fix it.” She laughed again and Kyuhyun did not know what to do with his brain full with every way someone could say _beautiful_.

“You know, I think I have seen you before” She said, looking at his face intently. She told him that his name also sounded vaguely familiar.

“Well, I am—or was—sort of famous. Ask around,” He said, smug. It had been a while, but being somewhat known felt nice.

She laughed again. _How could anyone laugh so much?_ “I think I can help you a bit. I can write something. I can help you with the lyrics,” Kyuhyun asked her if she was also a songwriter. She shook her head, and took a sip of her coffee again. “I’m sort of famous. Ask around,”

The remark made him chuckle, and now he had a co-writer in Nam-won.

Mido could finally put a finger on the familiarity of the name _Kyuhyun_ and his neighbor’s face when she watched a performance by a singer named Yesung on youtube. It fell into place in her head that they were in that one-hit-wonder singing trio from a few years back.

She looked them up on google and found a video of him singing. The trio was _really_ good, their three distinctive voices complimented each other and no one was autotuned. Kyuhyun’s voice was powerful and sounded like caramel on a cold day, but apparently the public preferred a dancing boy group. She clicked on a video of the three of them attempting to dance and chuckled. At least they tried.

“Should have stuck to ballads,” she muttered to no one in particular. She found herself smiling whenever he saw his new neighbor’s face on the video.

“So, how is this going to work?” Kyuhyun asked her on their first day working together.

It was two days after she offered to help. He was sitting in front of the keyboard in his living room with Mido standing next to him. She was wearing a bright yellow sweater, her hair let loose. He resisted the urge to touch her hair.

“Do you play?”

She shrugged. “A little. Can I?”

He scooted over to give her a room, and she sat down, smiling. He stared at her, looking curious. Then her hands started flying on the black and white keys, playing a familiar Beethoven piece, and all Kyuhyun could do was stare in awe.

“So you _do_ play,” he said, did not bother to mask his amazement.

“I took lessons a while back,” She told him it was one of the electives offered in her junior high school. Her piano teacher was nice, a lady with five cats and an ear for listening to teenage drama. “I can’t really come up with melodies, though.”

Kyuhyun hummed. He began playing random melodies his brain came up with in a whim. “You’re in charge of the lyrics, and I’m the melodies, okay?” This earned him a nod from her, and they both smiled.

He felt a little bit better about his writer’s block afterwards.

On their fourth session, they have completed the first verse, which they both considered a win.

“This is hard,” Mido sighed. “Songwriting is harder than my usual writing gig.”

Kyuhyun snorted. He played a variation of the song’s chord progression and tried to figure out how the chorus would go. “This is why I get paid good,”

Mido laughed. “How did you become a songwriter anyway?”

“I have always written the songs for my group.” He recalled composing their biggest hit in their dorm in his pajamas. He was a boy, barely 20, but the world had expected so much of him. He was supposed to act like an angel—no mistakes allowed, no wrong things said. Their next album did not do as well, the company lost their initial enthusiasm to the group, and after months and years people just did not remember them anymore. Kyuhyun told her all of this, words out of his mouth before realizing it himself.

Mido nodded, accepting the answer. A little concern rose behind her eyes. “So why _aren’t_ you singing anymore? Yesung is on music festivals a lot. Ryeowook is in a new group now, right?”

“You did your research,” Kyuhyun chuckled. “I still sing sometimes. At the karaoke.” He answered, tone light and teasing.  
She rolled her eyes but could not help a smile forming from her lips. “We should go to the karaoke together one day,”

“Only if you pay,” He chuckled again. “You know, you did your research but I haven’t done mine. I still don’t know what is it the writing gig you do.”

She shrugged. “It’s not that big of a deal anyway.”

He could not close his mouth reading what came up when he searched her name one night. Granted, he was never really an avid reader. The bookcases in his apartment mostly housed records and CDs. But even he knew that having a back-to-back best-selling novel was a _big deal_.

He quickly closed the search engine and texted her. _So you are famous **famous** , huh?_

_What do you mean?_

_I searched you up. Your new novel set a record for pre-order sales._

_Well, it is selling fine._

Kyuhyun chuckled at how nonchalant she seemed. He liked that about her. _It is selling more than fine, it is the biggest novel this year._

_The Hunger Games prequel is going to be released soon, so I am not too sure about that._

_Let me compliment you just once, okay? I think it’s fucking amazing._

The wait for her reply was long, too long. _Go to sleep already._

_Are you mad that I cursed?_

_What do you think I am? 15?_

_You look like it_. He laughed when typing his next response. _I was your height when I was 15._

_You’re annoying._

_What are you doing up anyway?_

_I was going to sleep but a certain someone kept texting me._

_I will stop now, then._

_Goodnight, Kyuhyun. See you tomorrow._

Kyuhyun spammed her with a bunch of stickers.

Mido told him that she could not meet today. Her grandfather had asked her to go with him and get some supplies from the town. He shrugged and said it was okay. _It’s not like I’m your boss anyway_. The remark made her laugh, and he felt his heart swell.

He spent the day listening to the audiobook of one of her novels. He found her writing simple and straight-forward. He really liked it and understood how her novels became best-sellers, but this fact only earned him a big laugh from Donghae when he had called two hours earlier. “Fuck off,” he had said, but Donghae laughed even harder. They wound up talking about the situation at the office and girls (Donghae’s girlfriend had been acting weird lately) and his neighbor-slash-co-writer’s pretty eyes. “Do you like her? I get the feeling that you do.” Donghae had tried to tease him. “Get your girlfriend to answer your messages first, then talk.” That had shut Donghae up.

He was making coffee for himself when Danggeun suddenly waddled over, eyes crinkled. He raised his eyebrows and turned around, expecting Mido, but his eyes met an older lady instead. She had the same smile that Mido had when she found his antics amusing. “Would you like to come over dinner? Mido’s already back.”

After dinner, Mido took him to what she called “the best place in the world” which turned out to be a park in the side of the Yocheon river. It looked deserted, as it usually was in this hour, but she told him she liked it better like this.

“I used to come here after school and ate an apple caramel,” She said, eyes focusing on the river’s calm current.

He hummed. He could feel the wind on his face, the cold a bit numbing. But it was okay. He liked it. The cold made him more attuned to the warmth radiating from her. A question suddenly popped up in his head, nagging to be answered. “When are you going to go back to Seoul?”

“Oh,” she whispered. “I’m not planning to go back.”

Kyuhyun felt his heart drop. “What do you mean?”

“I never fit in Seoul,” She turned her head, facing him. Their eyes met, and he tried to mask any expression he might have. “I like it here. It’s my home.”

“Oh,” he said, quietly.

They did not talk again for the rest of the night.

The only thing that was left of the song was the chorus, but they seemed to be stuck.

“Just throw some random words,” Kyuhyun groaned, looking a bit frustrated. “That’s what I usually do and the public ate it up. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just spit it out.”

“That’s not ideal,” Mido frowned. “They have to flow together. Besides, I don’t want my first ever song be a ‘random words thrown together’ type of song.”

He scratched Danggeun’s back, who currently was asleep at his feet. “Lyrics are important, but they’re just not as important as the melody.” He looked at her. “What? Do you think Ring Ding Dong topped the charts because of the lyrics? Of course not. What the hell does Ring Ding Dong even mean anyway?”

She stared at him, looking almost ready to smack him in the face, but she sighed instead. “A melody is like seeing someone for the first time. It’s like physical attraction.” She pressed a key on his keyboard. “But then, as you get to know the person.. that’s the lyrics. It’s their story, who they are underneath. It’s the combination of the two that makes it magic.”

He kept staring at her, but a little smile curved on his face.

“What?”

He shrugged, his smile widening.

“Shut up. You’re annoying,” Mido told him, and he burst out laughing.

“No wonder millions of people fall in love with Minjun, the one who created him is a hopeless romantic,” Kyuhyun said, enjoying how her cheeks reddened at the mention of the love interest in one of her novels. He thought she looked like a tomato like this, but he found that he liked it. Today she let her hair loose, which was always his favorite look of hers. Her eyes narrowed a little. _It's so_ _pretty, her eyes._ Kyuhyun raised her eyebrows when she got even redder.

A ring from her phone startled them both. She smiled apologetically at him, asking a minute to answer the phone. He shrugged, still smiling wide. He watched her got up from the keyboard and answered her phone with “Oh, Ikjun! I’ve missed you!”.

Ikjun came to visit one Friday and told him he was going to stay for a week. Since his parents already moved away, _of course_ her grandparents offered him to stay with them. They knew each other since high school, but they never really talked back then. He was sort of an acquittance of an acquittance. They really got to know each other when they both moved to Busan for college. Being the only two people of their town attending Busan National, they checked on each other a lot and became best friends. Besides, Ikjun’s penchant for college party made her less of an outcast at Busan, simply by being associated with him.

Mido was happy to see him, but having a guest meant not having time to finish the song with Kyuhyun. It had been three days since she had last seen him, and he had not texted her at all either. She stared at Ikjun, who was currently eating her grandmother’s tofu stew besides her. “Why do you come here anyway?”

“I’ve missed you!” Ikjun said, swallowing another big bite of tofu. Mido just watched as he tried his best to put meat, tofu, and the seaweed to his mouth in one go. She rolled her eyes and told him that they were no longer living in the 90s, and that a little technology called Skype did exist. “Honestly, are you hiding something? Why do you keep wanting me to go away?”

She sighed and told him to stop being ridiculous. “Which part of _don’t you have a job_ sounds like a conspiracy to you?”

He raised his eyebrows and gave her a tofu to eat straight from his chopsticks. “That doesn’t, but he does.”

Mido turned around to see Kyuhyun staring at her and Ikjun with unreadable expression. He darted his eyes at the floor a second later. “I’m sorry, I was just going to borrow some scissors but I guess I interrupted something.” She did not even get the chance to say anything to him before he bolted out of the door.

She looked at Ikjun, whose eyes screamed mischief. “So I guess I just ruined your romance?”

“Hey, just explain to him that we are just friends. I’m sure he’ll understand.” Ikjun said when they were done with dinner.

She snorted, hands scrubbing the fat from the plates a little harder. “I don’t owe him an explanation. He’s not my boyfriend or anything of the sort.” _I don’t even know if he likes me_ , Mido said to herself. Kyuhyun lived in Seoul and he would go back there when he had defeated his writer’s block. Hell, he might already have defeated it by now. She already made up her mind anyway, that she was going to live here, in Nam-won. She was not possibly reconsidering moving here, _right? Right?_

“Well, you clearly do care about what he thinks if you’re this upset,” He said, looking at the squeaky-clean plate she kept scrubbing for the past five minutes. She shook her head, seemingly trying to escape her thoughts, and rinsed off the plate.

Mido smacked him on the shoulder.

Ikjun left four days later. He winked at her and mouthed _go talk to him I know you like him_ when he boarded the train. She curled her fingers into a fist and made a punching motion at him as her answer.

She was just planning to buy a cappuccino for herself when her phone went _ting!_ A message was displayed on her lockscreen.

_Can you meet me at the park?_

He felt someone walking up beside him. He kept his silence, and she too. He stared off at the calm current of the river, ears listening to the sounds of kids running around the park. It was sunny. It was always sunny in Nam-won.

“Ikjun is just my friend,” he heard her suddenly. He turned his face to her. She wore her bright yellow sweater again today. Her eyes were still on the river. Her loose hair was swayed by the wind, its jet-black color a contrast to all the brightness that is _her._

He smiled, did not know what to make out of the situation. “I know.” They were silent again for a while.

“I finished the song,” he whispered, and began singing.

_If I tell you I love you_   
_If I tell you I miss you_   
_You’d run away even more_   
_On a windy day, my love that remains alone_   
_Quietly stays again today_

Mido looked at him. “You don’t have writer’s block any more?” He nodded. “Does this mean you’re going back to Seoul?” He nodded again.

He saw her eyes cloud. Her expression darkened but she quickly schooled it to show her smile. She told him _congratulations for kicking it in the ass!_ with a dry laugh. He stared at her, but then closed his eyes and smiled. “Hey Mido,” he looked right at her eyes, “Would you maybe reconsider your plans to move away from Seoul?”

She widened her eyes, surprised.

“With me.” He took a step forward. “Would you want to live there with me?”

She looked at him, her hair was messy. The wind kept messing up her hair and he kept wanting to tuck a strand behind her ear. She reached to sweep her hair behind her ear, even when there was nothing to tuck behind. “What,” she said when he raised his eyebrows. “I’m just doing what you wanted to do. You said it out loud.”

He felt a laugh escape his mouth. This girl was nothing quite like anyone he had ever met—and that made her confusing and exciting and _beautiful_. He reached for her hair, finally tucking out her hair behind her ear. Her bright brown eyes were piercing back at him. “Have I ever said you have pretty eyes before?”

She nodded. “Yeah. You said a lot of things out loud, actually.”

He chuckled again, and considered it for a moment. “Really?”

Then he kissed her.

The karaoke they were at was famous for quickly updating their catalogue, so they chose it for their outing tonight.

He pressed some codes to the machine, and a familiar melody came on the speaker. They each grabbed the microphones and sang the song on top of their lungs, earning big laughs from each other.

Kyuhyun looked at her eyes when they got to the end of the song.

_If I tell you I love you, I am afraid you will run away_

It was supposed to be her turn the next line, but Mido smiled and kissed him instead.

_I will stay right here, with you._

Outside of the karaoke room, Seoul remained busy and confusing, but she thought she liked the city a little bit better.

**Author's Note:**

> the lyrics are from Kyuhyun's Aewol-ri, which is a gem guys. Also, he actually composed and wrote the lyrics himself!! You need to listen to it.
> 
> Anyway, Jeon Mido is an actress, mainly in musicals, but she is currently starring at the drama Hospital Playlist<3 she worked opposite Kyuhyun for the musical drama Werther back in 2015, and I thought they were adorable.


End file.
